Souls press around Dante requesting that he pray for them, or carry messages to their living relatives who can pray on their behalf. The intercession of the living accelerates a soul's time in Purgatory — a doctrine of communion between the Church Militant (living) and the Church Suffering (purgatory). Dante draws a brilliant analogy: he is like the winner of a dice game being followed by everyone who wants a piece of his luck.
But this raises a genuine theological problem: if God's judgment is final, how can prayer change it? Dante puts the question to Virgil, who acknowledges he cannot resolve it — Beatrice will. This moment is important: Virgil's reason is honest about its own edges. The answer, which Dante will eventually receive, is that God's foreknowledge already accounts for the prayers that will be offered — the prayers are part of the plan, not revisions to it.
On the slope they encounter Sordello, the 13th-century troubadour poet from Mantua. When Virgil identifies himself, Sordello — a fellow Mantuan — rushes to embrace him. This moment of civic and literary brotherhood triggers one of the great political tirades of the poem: Dante pivots from the scene of two Mantuans embracing to apostrophize all of Italy in white-hot rage. Italy, once the seat of empire and civilization, is now a ship without a helmsman in the midst of a storm, a house of ill fame, not a nation but a brothel. Her cities are at war with each other. Florence in particular — Dante's own Florence — is subjected to bitter irony: look how fine she is, so clever, so just! Is it not wonderful how her laws, her coinage, her citizens, change every October? The bitterness is at once poetic performance and genuine grief. Dante loved Florence enough to be destroyed by his exile from her.